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Casey Jones
Engineer
Biography
John Luther “Casey” Jones (March 14, 1864 – April 30, 1900) was an American railroader who died when his passenger train, pulled by locomotive Number 382, collided with a stalled freight train at Vaughan, Mississippi.
Jones was born in rural southeastern Missouri, and his family moved to Cayce, Kentucky, after his mother, Ann Nolan Jones and his father, Frank Jones, a schoolteacher, decided that the rural areas of Missouri offered few opportunities. In Kentucky, he acquired the nickname “Cayce,” which he chose to spell as “Casey.”
Jones’ lifelong goal was to be an engineer.
After joining the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, he excelled at his job and was eventually promoted to brakeman on the Columbus, Kentucky, to Jackson, Tennessee, route. Following this, he was promoted to fireman on the Jackson, Tennessee to Mobile, Alabama route.
During the summer of 1887, a yellow fever outbreak affected numerous train crews on the Illinois Central Railroad. Jones saw an opportunity to advance his career more quickly as a fireman on that line. He joined Illinois Central on March 1, 1888, and began operating a freight locomotive between Jackson, Tennessee and Water Valley, Mississippi.
A few years later, on February 23, 1891, he was promoted to engineer.
In January 1900, Jones transferred to the “Cannonball Express” passenger run between Memphis and Canton, Mississippi, part of a run between Chicago and New Orleans.
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John Pendleton King
President
Biography
John Pendleton King (April 3, 1799 – March 19, 1888) was a prominent attorney, railroad executive and politician who served as a United States Senator from Georgia.
King was born in Glasgow, Kentucky, in 1799, but his family moved to Bedford County, Tennessee. In 1815, the family moved to Augusta, Georgia.
King, a graduate of the Academy of Richmond County, was admitted to the bar in 1819 and started practicing law in Augusta. He married Mary Louise Woodward, and they had three children, two daughters and a son.
King’s served in the Georgia state constitutional conventions of 1830 and 1833.
He was appointed Court of Common Pleas judge in 1831 and elected to the United States Senate in 1833 as a Jacksonian, later a Democrat. He served until 1837, resigning amid a financial panic he attributed to President Andrew Jackson’s policies.
After leaving politics, King was elected president of the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company in 1841, a position he held until 1878. He promoted railroad development and cotton manufacturing in Georgia.
King’s plantation holdings included owning 68 slaves by 1860 to work his extensive cotton fields.
King’s legacy includes the city of Kingston, Georgia, named in his honor, and Pendleton King Park in Augusta, named after his grandson. The Western & Atlantic Railroad also named a locomotive in his honor.
He passed away in Summerville, Georgia, and was interred in St. Paul’s Churchyard in Augusta, Georgia.
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Ed Lewis
Biography
Like many lifelong railroaders, Edward “Ed” Lewis’s love affair with trains and railroads began as a child. Growing up in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, he would explore, often by bicycle, rail lines and stations in his home state and in New York.
Lewis began his career in the railroad industry in 1963 at the Long Island Rail Road, where he served as a clerk. He was assistant to the president and general manager of the Arcade and Attica Railroad in New York; auditor of freight revenue at the Providence & Worcester Railroad in Rhode Island; vice president of the Strasburg Rail Road in Pennsylvania; and secretary-treasurer and general manager of the Lamoille Valley Railroad Company in Vermont.
In 1987, Lewis was the first company outsider hired as president of the Aberdeen and Rockfish Railroad (A&R) in North Carolina. He held that position for 20 years until 2007. In a 2017 article about the A&R in the News & Observer, Lewis was credited with bringing about much of the railroad’s most recent successes.
Lewis’s interest in railroads extended beyond his work managing them. He wrote several books about railroads that often featured photographs he took himself. In 1971, he published his first book, the Wellsville, Addison and Galeton Railroad: Sole Leather Line, which told the history of the WAG, as the railroad was affectionately known.
Lewis’s most famous book remains his American Shortline Railway Guide, a directory of small railroads, featuring “facts, figures, and detailed locomotive rosters” of hundreds of U.S. short lines. Copies of Lewis’s railway guide can still be found in ASLRRA’s Washington, D.C. office and the Association has called this book the original gold standard of statistical and historical information for short lines.
Lewis, remembered by many as “Mr. Short Line,” was an avid collector of railroad ephemera, including historic railroad passes, timetables, maps, and tickets. At one time, he maintained arguably the most comprehensive collection of railroad timetables and historic stock certificates in North America.
Ed Lewis passed away on Nov. 11, 2015, after battling Parkinson’s disease.
George Thomas Lewis
Receiver
Biography
George Thomas Lewis (1816-August 21, 1882), a Pennsylvania native, was instrumental in re-building the Memphis, Clarksville and Louisville Railroad after the Civil War.
He served as receiver of the railroad from July 1, 1865, to April 1, 1867.